We are opening a new section in the blog - customer support research. We will check what is happening in a real business with customer service and share the discoveries with you. Facts are impartial and poke their nose into those deserted corners, where sometimes I do not want to look at all. In general, it's time to tear the covers!

In the pilot issue, we decided to find out how things are with support in e-commerce, and conducted a study among online stores and B2B services - from logistics to marketing. For verification, we identified the closest direction for us - support in the mail and social networks. From the study you will find out how long it takes to wait for answers, which channel is best to contact and whether it is worth contacting the e-commerce in writing. We admit, the results surprised even us.

As explored

We took the top 100 stores of 2015 from the Ruward rating and 317 services from the Data Insight e-Commerce Ecosystem . We found e-mails of companies, groups on Facebook and Vkontakte, and under the guise of a client Anatoly addressed simple questions.

Shopping Hello! Tell me, how long does the pickup point work? Help place an order! I only need to arrange delivery somehow today.

Services Good day! Tell me, what are your tariffs and what is the procedure for concluding a contract, how long will it take?

They wrote only during working hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, so as not to throw up support for work at the end of the day and not to violate the purity of the experiment.

As a result, we got three metrics:

• The number of channels in which companies responded
• Response rate
• Quality

Based on these metrics, we compiled a general rating of stores and services. But the conclusions that stand behind the numbers in the ranking are much more interesting. Let's talk about our discoveries in order.

Where should i write?

Mail
Anatoly did not wait for an answer by mail from half of online stores and services. The indicator coincided with an accuracy of 1%, as in a pharmacy.

The likelihood that you will be answered by e-mail is 50 to 50.

Why is the mail address listed on the companies on the site a mystery. E-commerce either does not know how, or does not want to work with e-mails, so it is better to call immediately.

Social networks
Online stores take into account that their audience lives on Vkontakte and respond there three times more often than services.

Services do not consider social networks as a support channel - approximately 20% of services replied to personal messages to the group. This is due to the fact that their clients - companies do not discuss the terms of cooperation and working issues in social networks. To communicate with providers, a business would rather prefer more reliable and proven channels over the years - mail and telephone.

How much to wait?

On average, companies respond to written requests by mail and Vkontakte within 1-2 hours. Facebook is the slowest channel, in a third of cases you will be answered only the next day.

Are the answers worth the wait?

The biggest disappointment is the quality of the answers. After checking over 500 messages from companies, I came across 10 really good ones that I boldly wrote down in a sample. At first, I wanted to cry at first from laughter, and then from tears, when it became clear that this was the norm for the majority. The result - only 6% of online stores and 14% of services deserved a rating above 3 points and at the same time answered within an hour.


Companies do not know how to communicate with customers in writing. I have identified 3 main problems in the content of the answers.

1. Shipment

Almost no one provides real support in social networks. Companies kick off customers into other channels - telephone and mail. Considering that they respond in the mail every time, the client has to make a lot of efforts and knock on all doors to get an answer to a simple question.

Percentage of companies that advised Anatolia to write by mail or call back.

The external activity of Vkontakte stores turned out to be a fiction - a third were unable to answer the question immediately.


On Facebook, there were 3 times less such deficiencies. Companies respond more slowly, but fully.

2. Deafness and indifference

Companies responded to get rid of: missed questions, ignored claims, did not offer a solution, demanded additional data without explaining why. Sometimes there was a feeling that they were responding not to you, but to some imaginary client.

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3. The culture of correspondence

Politeness, literacy, customer care - in some companies this is all banned, they may even lose their bonuses if you suddenly say hello in a letter or put punctuation marks. Otherwise, such pearls cannot be explained.

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And how to answer

I will show for what answers we put the highest score. Here everything is as it should - feel the difference.

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Good answers made the service more enjoyable. B2B companies realize that a lost customer will be expensive and pay attention to the quality of support. Mortal buyers were not lucky, “there are many of you, but I am alone” - unfortunately, this is the only way to describe the style of communication of online stores with customers. And it's online, just a minute, an advanced field. Comparing the assessment of stores and services, we found that stores in the mail respond one and a half times worse.

Here we dug a little deeper to understand what is hidden behind the average rating of stores in the mail 1.8 points.

Helpdesk Magic

Let's go back two steps. When we conceived the study, we were interested in how many companies use helpdesk as a special system for support instead of the usual mail program and whether this affects the speed and quality of responses. The numbers for services and stores coincided again.

A third of the companies have already moved from Outlook to Helpdesk.

We were sure that support with helpdesk responded faster and were ready to write this into a competitive advantage, but to our disappointment, it turned out that helpdesk did not affect speed.

Then we checked the ratings of companies with helpdesk and without - and came across a curious coincidence.


Shops with helpdesk responded almost as well as services, and those that do not use helpdesk are just one and a half times worse. It was the stores without helpdesk that pulled down the overall rating of stores in comparison with services.

It would be tempting to conclude that helpdesk improves the quality of support answers, but it is more correct to look from a different angle. Companies that rely on quality service understand that the work with calls needs to be debugged - sorting letters, appointing responsible, monitoring deadlines, taking statistics and analyzing bottlenecks. To solve these problems, companies use helpdesk. Systematization of work is only the first step.

We put things in order in the support organization, scavenged the garbage, put everything on the shelves, now you can think about beauty - learn to write correctly, communicate with the client in his language, work with negatives, create a positive impression, take care of the client. As a result, we see that companies with help provide the best service, because they have already moved to this next stage. And at what stage are you? :)

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Read more about the results of the study in the full version  with detailed statistics, funny pictures and comments of industry experts, plus the Top 10 best services and companies.